Firefighters arrived quickly and began working the blaze with an optimism that proved premature. By late evening, they believed they had contained the fire, reporting only minimal damage to the wooden superstructure atop the stone base. But there was a complication: authorities had instructed the firefighters not to fight the fire aggressively out of fear that high-pressure water would damage the centuries-old structure. They were trying to save the gate by not saving it too hard. After midnight, the dying fire reignited. This time it moved fast. More than 360 firefighters fought to stop the spread, but the ancient timbers, dry and ready, fed the flames with a voracity that modern equipment could not overcome. By morning, the entire wooden pavilion was gone. Only the stone foundation walls remained standing, blackened and scarred. No one was injured -- except the nation's sense of its own past.

Chae was not a political extremist or a cultural vandal driven by ideology. He was a man who felt cheated. He had sold land to developers and believed he had not been fully compensated. His grievance was mundane; his target was not. He chose Namdaemun because it was easily accessible -- the gate stood in central Seoul, guarded only by motion sensors. He told police he had also considered attacking trains or buses but rejected those options because they would cause casualties. The gate was unoccupied, unguarded by human eyes, and profoundly important to the nation. It was, in a terrible sense, the perfect target for a man who wanted to be noticed. On April 25, 2008, Chae was convicted and sentenced to ten years in prison.

Namdaemun was not merely old. Originally built in 1398 during the early Joseon dynasty, it was the first structure ever designated a National Treasure under South Korean law. Its destruction triggered a national outpouring of grief that surprised even Koreans with its intensity. South Korean newspapers turned their anger on the government for failing to provide adequate security for the country's most important cultural monument. The Cultural Heritage Administration estimated reconstruction would take three years and cost $21 million. What made reconstruction possible at all was a piece of bureaucratic foresight: in 2006, two years before the fire, officials had created 182 pages of detailed blueprints of the gate as a contingency measure against possible damage. Those documents became the foundation for the restoration.

President Lee Myung-bak initially proposed financing the restoration through private donations, but the suggestion backfired. Many citizens felt the government should pay, given that its failure to protect the gate had allowed the destruction in the first place. Lee's transition committee walked back the proposal, confirming the government would cover most costs. The restoration was painstaking. Craftsmen studied the 2006 blueprints and historical records, using traditional Joseon-era construction techniques to rebuild the wooden pavilion atop its surviving stone base. Five years after the fire, on May 4, 2013, the restored Sungnyemun reopened to the public. The gate stands today in central Seoul, straddling a busy road as it has for centuries, its fresh timbers slowly aging toward the patina of the structure they replaced. South Korea overhauled its cultural heritage protection protocols in the wake of the fire, installing guards and fire suppression systems at major monuments. The lesson of Namdaemun was simple and brutal: what took 550 years to build can be destroyed in a single night by one person with a grievance and a lighter.